Don't Eat Your Soul to Fill Your Belly

My friend Jon is truly one of the oddest boys you could ever meet. The picture of the rebellious, sometimes-passionate Gen X teen, Jon is impulsive, introverted, witty, and strange. He somehow manages to win our affections, but through it all, he maintains an air of oddity that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in another human being.

I should also mention that Jon – undisciplined, lackadaisical, and sociable – weighs about one hundred pounds soaking wet, yet is almost six foot three inches tall. It came as a shock to me, then, when Jon let me know mid way through our senior year of high school that he had enlisted in the Marines. I shouldn’t have been surprised; it’s that kind of impulsive behavior that seems to define Jon. He’s the type of boy you would expect to grow up and live in a yuppie neighborhood of a major city, drinking Starbucks four times a day while dressed in blaze orange jumpsuits and wearing horn rimmed spectacles.

In case you’ve never noticed, Gen Xers like my friend Jon often have a very philosophical side to them. If you’ve never seen the musical Rent, I’m definitely not recommending it, but there’s most certainly a philosophical leaning interjected in nearly every phase of the musical. Instead of being apathetic adolescents, Gen Xers actually are often passionate people, committed to certain causes with insatiable zeal. Sometimes the causes are beyond what you would expect from such individuals, too. In Rent, the plot centers on themes like AIDS, homophobia, and racial tension. Yet, for reasons unbeknownst to the audience, there is a wonderfully dramatic moment in the middle of a scene where one of the characters exclaims, “The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”

It curious to me that this yuppie generation, of which I am a proud member, would bother to insert passion into an otherwise apathetic existence. Yet instead of sitting around playing video games all day, there is an increasingly large segment of twenty-somethings that spends a hearty portion of time waxing philosophical. Rather than abandoning ancient art forms like poetry and painting because they are outdated or require too much energy, this otherwise lazy generation embraces such forms, attending art galleries and often supplying said galleries with their works.
Generation X is chock full of contradictions. The members are all at once listless and zealous, lethargic and energized, nationalistic and individualistic, carefree and depressed, satisfied and insatiable. It is a dynamic that sociologists and psychologists are baffled by, and as a member of this generation, I am no less perplexed by the yuppification of society. Certainly the roots of this generation are visible in history – the erosion of values, the overemphasis of philosophies, and the brainwashing of despair and science make it nearly impossible to prevent such a generation from being formed. Nevertheless, their name is fitting. Generation X is the generation of variables, a society where every moment of analysis shows you once more that the themes and structures of the generation are unknown and likely to remain so.

It is against this backdrop that my friend Jon fits. I love him to death, and he loves others to death, and there’s no day that goes by where something surprising does not come forth from his wellspring of randomness. In the spring of my senior year of high school, Jon and I, along with the rest of our classmates, traveled to New York City for our class trip. Most of us were suburban kids from middle class New Hampshire homes, so New York City, to us, was a giant playground. In the midst of the trip, however, Jon appeared one night wearing a black shirt on which he had pasted a bumper sticker reading, “Don’t eat your soul to fill your belly.”
Now, I do not have the foggiest notion where Jon got this sticker, nor do I care. The fact of the matter is, I think that “Don’t eat your soul to fill your belly” is a wonderfully Gen X way of saying what we as Christians have been preaching for centuries. Thus, I think Christians can and should learn two things from my friend Jon’s shirt.

First, we should realize that unique ways of reaching people are good. Since the Word of God finds itself as a lava lamp, repackaging the same message to a different audience, our message, while never compromising truth, should come to crowds in a way that is appealing to them. Gen X kids are more difficult to reach than most generations before us because we don’t follow any one trend. If that’s so, then the gospel needs to be available tons of different ways. If a bumper sticker reading, “Don’t eat your soul to fill your belly” can accurately convey the person of Jesus Christ to a lost child, then it is an effective means of sharing the gospel.
Yet, we as Christians tend to shy away from such forms of evangelism. It’s almost like we feel that certain methods or certain places are inappropriate scenarios in which to share God’s love. Some unique opportunities present themselves for Christians to present Jesus to a dying generation, but we often let the pitch slide by, content to sit back and take more conventional routs of presenting.

My church has taken on two brand new means of reaching the lost that I happen to think are stellar outreach mechanisms. The first involved considerable cost to the congregation, but paid for a team of professional Christian bodybuilders to come in and break stuff. Over a series of days, the guys demolished thousands of dollars in sports equipment, construction supplies, and other various objects as they proved they had loads of strength. They ran through walls of ice, snapped baseball bats (even metal ones) like twigs, and rolled frying pans up like tacos.
Some people would not lump such behavior with evangelism, but I witnessed it with my own eyes. A whole new set of people wandered into our church over those days, and some of them have stayed. Hundreds went forward to accept Christ as Savior when these powerful men shared their testimonies and their faith in Christ’s blood. Maybe the method was a bit out of the box, but the results prove that it was an effective means of reaching a segment of the population.

Another project my church took on was reaching bikers during Bike Week, an annual event that takes place in New Hampshire each summer. This week literally attracts millions of motorcycle enthusiasts into our state for a week of testosterone driven fun on loud and fast motorcycles. Seeing an opportunity, some men in my church took it upon themselves to put together a program to reach the bikers who flocked to our state. If people are literally pouring into your area, there is no better time to reach them with the gospel.

In case you haven’t noticed, there are tremendously successful churches that seem to use marketing more often than theology to reach the lost. I do not think it is the job of the Church to commercialize Jesus, and some churches turn their evangelization into an entertainment industry. Others, though, effectively engage audiences with Christ’s message because they present it in a way that is attractive to a particular demographic.

One of the masters of this craft is Bill Hybels, a man whose degree did not come from a seminary, but rather holds a degree in marketing. His church, Willow Creek, has touched millions for Jesus Christ. You may not agree with Willow Creek’s theology or even their method, but they have had an undeniable impact of the lives of people all over the world. The Church could do well to take a page out of their evangelism book.

The second point Jon’s shirt revealed to me is that too often we as Christians trade in eternity for the moment. We “eat our souls to fill our bellies,” as the sticker said. Christ has called us to live distinctly Christian lives that are completely sold out to Him in every aspect. That’s not always easy and it requires self discipline. The self discipline required is so great that the apostle Paul even said he beat his body to bring it into subjection.

One of the signs of maturity is the ability to delay gratification for a more profitable gain. Businessmen understand this concept. Sometimes it is necessary to spend money to make back a larger sum later. While it may hurt to shell out the capital to begin with, the promise of future gains is worth the cost.

Parents understand this concept, too. Even though most dads would love to own a boat or a summer home on the beach, they recognize that the pleasure derived from that sort of thing would last about eight minutes. Instead, paying for the education of their son or daughter takes priority and gives a lasting reward far greater than the pleasure the recreation could provide.

Unfortunately, most of us do not carry this level of maturity over into our Christian walks. Our eyes become bigger than our brains, and we cave into whatever pleasure we want in the moment. Instead of taming our tongues, we use scathing words because we are frustrated. Instead of hiding our eyes, we indulge in the images of scantily clad people floating across our screens. Instead of changing the radio station, we listen to the abominable music that blatantly mocks the things of the Lord. Instead of controlling our urges to eat, we gorge ourselves on the cake in the kitchen. Instead of encouraging a brother, we keep to ourselves because we don’t want to be mocked. Instead of showing up at church, we head to the NFL game or the ballpark. Instead of praying in the morning, we spend our moments sleeping in just a bit longer.

We eat our souls to fill our bellies all the time. We exchange eternal reward for temporal pleasures, and the result is that we have a consumer driven, self-centered, egoist society that has no idea how to live like a New Testament church. When we live in light of God’s principles, it requires work and it usually results in temporary pain of some sort. We may have to delay the pleasure we seek or avoid our own gratification. Despite this, God promises eternal reward far better than the gain we get in the moment. He gives us true joy in exchange for our momentary happiness, and He gives us lasting peace in exchange for our fleeting pleasure.

Live like a Christian should. Don’t eat your soul to fill your belly.